Making health and safety the concern of every employee is the only way to reach zero harm targets, writes Lynnette Hoffman
Making health and safety the concern of every employee is the only way to reach zero harm targets, writes Lynnette Hoffman
When a senior executive of a manufacturing company hosted the global president of his company on a plant tour a few years ago, he was not expecting to find an electrician standing on top of a machine with no fall arrest or safety protection in place. To make an already bad situation worse, the executive did nothing, except usher the president off in a different direction.
His reaction, or lack thereof, did not go unnoticed, and not only did the executive face career-limiting actions in the aftermath, the ramifications of his behaviour were felt company-wide. “Many shop floor workers noticed the executive not noticing, and his OHS credibility was shot,” says Eric Curtis, CEO of the National Safety Council of Australia.
The event highlights the need for organisations to train managers in the importance of symbolic leadership, Curtis says. Typically, organisations focus on the continuing development of management systems, and in physically improving the safety of machines by adding guards, for instance, but the people component often gets passed over.
“The critical reality is that if people on board are not committed, then the investment in other areas is going to be rendered useless. You can have a fabulous management system and certificates on the wall showing all the standards you meet, but if the culture is poor and people see a problem and ignore it, then nothing happens,” Curtis says. “The tricky part is to [achieve] total commitment to zero harm. It might seem unachievable but legislatively it is what is required.”
The key to making the other investments worthwhile is to develop and implement HR processes that focus on engaging the whole workforce and motivating staff to take ownership. “People need to understand that it’s their responsibility. They need to say ‘it’s my job.’ Someone at the lowest level needs to feel that when they come across a health and safety issue they have both the authority and the responsibility to not ignore it,” Curtis says.
But how do you achieve such deep commitment on a company-wide basis? In recent times, there’s been a shift in the types of training and strategies that organisations are using. Models that focus on training a small group of experts to observe their co-workers and provide feedback, corrections and suggestions, are falling out of favour, as research finds that their benefits seem to be restricted to the short-term, Curtis says. Immediately after such training courses, safety improves, but in the long term it’s not sustainable, he says. “What we’re trying to do now is train everyone to be sensitive to issues that can lead to accidents and feel confident that they mustn’t ignore it if they see something.
“The organisations that are doing the best job tend to have leaders that are really switched on to how to symbolically lead,” he says. While this may come more naturally to some people than it does others, it’s not something you need to be born with. Like other skills, the ability to lead symbolically is something that can be developed, perhaps through workshops that help people to understand the power of their own behaviour and work through scenarios that provide opportunities for analysis and a chance to develop strategies for dealing with issues that may arise again in the future.
“It creates a whole new project management load. It starts at the top with sensitising the leaders to understand the critical role they play in ensuring everyone in the organisation has sufficient knowledge and skills in the overall zero harm mission,” Curtis says.
The challenge lies in trying to get everyone in the organisation to take ownership of health and safety issues as a long term investment, as opposed to a quick fix solution that looks neat, he says. And the health and safety industry has been somewhat behind the eight ball in defining ROI in many respects.
“American studies show that every dollar spent on prevention will offset the cost of correction by $6 – that’s enormous,” Curtis says. Big ticket items such as worker’s compensation claims and insurance premiums also benefit from increased focus on health and safety. Other benefits include decreased absenteeism and improved productivity and staff morale.
A long-term study into the link between health and workers’ compensation claims at Xerox Corporation in the United States found that increased health risk factors were directly linked to increased workers’ compensation costs. The more health risks people had, the higher the costs. And non-intensive interventions that led to lower health risks were associated with a savings of US$1,238 ($1,757) per person. The numbers highlight the need for a comprehensive approach.
“It’s important that organisations don’t just invest in the elimination and control of physical hazards and removing the visible hazards, but also the invisible ones in the organisational culture,” Curtis says. “There are some very practical workshops to equip leaders and everyone else in the organisation to take the lead when they see a problem.”
